Wednesday, April 25, 2007

I started scanning through today's American Idol episode, which is devoted to raising money to fight AIDS in Africa, among other things. It got me thinking, "these people can't all be that promiscuous." So I found this article and thought it was interesting:
Here's an excerpt:

Every major campaign against AIDS in Africa has been based on the premise that heterosexual sex accounts for 90 percent of transmission in adults. Yet safe-sex efforts have not stopped the spread of the epidemic, which now affects 30 million people. Economic anthropologist David Gisselquist therefore suspected that HIV might be spreading primarily by another route. After analyzing 20 years of epidemiological studies, he and his colleagues concluded that unsafe injections, blood transfusions, and other medical procedures may account for most AIDS transmission in African adults. Their analysis indicates that no more than 35 percent of HIV in that population is spread through sex.